I will not go into the technical specs and will share the first impressions feelings I had when I unboxed the A7rIV the very first day.
Note: I owned all A7r cameras so far. This is the difference between my “Old” A7rIII and A7rIV:
What’s good:
1) The first things I noticed is the tactile feeling. Buttons feel better, the camera body looks like it’s better built too.
2) Opening the side doors (battery and connection) feels WAY more solid than before. They are no more flimsy and they feel pleasantly “dumped” probably because of the extra weathersealing. This is probably the best first impression point I had
3) Yes my mid sized hand fits much better on t he larger grip. Also my fingers are no more squeezed between the lens and the grip.
4) EVF is great but somehow I feel I still need and even bigger resolution for my manual focus shooting. The EVF jump form the A7rII to A7rIII felt bigger than the one from the A7rIII to the A7rIV.
What’s not so good:
1) That damn screen should really have gotten more resolution and grown up touchscreen functions
2) That new top rear dial position look off the place, doesn’t feel good to rotate and it also not as easy to rotate as it was before.
3) The grip still looks like as it was glued afterwards on the body. A more harmonic design would be appreciated on the next A7rV :)
Don’t know why…but on the images posted by Imaging Resource the A7rIV colors seem to be more “natural” looking.
At higher ISO the A7rIV images are noisier….but still sharper
ISO 6400
Pixel Shift
And Albert Dros tested the A7rIV PIxel Shift mode:
The 16 shot pixel shift functions works great if you want a crazy amount of detail. Use cases would be architectural photography and still life. I’m not sure if I will use it a lot in the field. To be honest: probably not. But I definitely would like to experiment with this more. The amount of extra detail and resolution you get from the 16 shot pixel shift is too significant to ignore and deserves a try to implement it in my workflow.
Sony a7R IV gallery update: Raw conversions added at Dpreview.
Sony A7R4 in Paris, Brussels and Bangkok with the G Master 2470f/2.8 (Traveljournalist).
We were all a bit distracted by the launch of the two new A6600 and A6100 cameras to really focus on the two new APS-C lenses. Personally I believe the launch of the new 16-55mm and 70-350mm lens is a bigger news :)
Today I will focus on the new 70-350mm APS-C E-mount lens. This is why the lens is so interesting:
1) It’s the first serious quality wildlife lens for the APS-C shooters
2) In the Full frame E-mount world you do not have a 105-525mm zoom option!
3) Usually such kind of lenses from Canon and Nikon comes as 70-300mm lens. Those extra 50mm at the tele end are very welcome for wildlife shooters!
4) The lens isn’t cheap but it’s cheaper than the Sony FE 70-300mm lens (I know I am comparingg apple and oranges here)
5) MFT chart (see below) and image samples posted at Sony.net show the lens delivers an impressive IQ
6) The lens is very lightweight, weather sealed…ideal for outdoor hiking and long time handheld shooting!
I believe if you own an APS-C E-mount camera you should definitely checkout this lens!
Slightly behind the ILCE-7RM3 at higher ISO settings. I don’t think that’s a big deal given the higher resolution.
I think this is a great result if you think the new A7rIV has 50% more resolution. UPDATE: Bill Claff told me the A7rIV have been normalized to a consistent viewing condition
